Best Bird of the Weekend (Last of November 2009)

How was your weekend? Any good birds? (Turducken doesn’t count!) Don’t be shy… tell us about your best bird!

My best bird was Great Black-backed Gull on the Tappan Zee Bridge en route from NYC to Rochester; great black-backs always look so regal perched atop lightposts. Charlie contended with any number of common British backyard birds. Corey, however, far and away took the prize when a Shearwater landed in his Queens, NY apartment. We suspect that he’ll probably be Corey’s best bird of every weekend!

What was your best bird of the weekend? Tell us about the rarest, loveliest, or most fascinating bird you observed in the comments section. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, we invite you to include the link in your comment.

Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he’s also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.

Definitely a raptor weekend here in southeast Arizona; I’ve put photos of four falcon species up at http://birdaz.com . But my favorite of the weekend had to be Sage Sparrows, which are pretty local around here and always beautiful.

Link to post best bird of our wonderful week-end was a fourth year Imperial Eagle; the Kaiseradler Aquila heliaca is an all too scarce migrant to northern Tanzania. This raggedy adolescent was probably driven south by Kenya’s dreadful and continuing drought.

I didn’t really get any birding done and would only like to comment that I googled “Turducken” and find that serving me a dead turkey stuffed with a dead duck stuffed with a dead chicken stuffed with (obviously also dead) sausage is possibly the one thing that could turn me into a radical vegetarian once and for all.

@Nate: Ha! Okay, I am willing to admit that Turducken might taste very good, but it’s just too much meat – you know – like a poultry version of “Supersize me”. But no worries, lots of good things did rub off on me but it was not necessarily the American food.
Okay, while I am at it (hijacking 10,000birds), I did enjoy Angel Cake, donuts (although iut was incredibly difficult to find a Horton’s around Ann Arbor – Horton’s is Canadian, right?), sushi, and your steak (beef tastes much better in the US than in Europe, for some reason – probably the way cattle is bred in the US).
However, I severely missed German bread, European cheese, a decent beer, and generally foods where reading the content doesn’t require a PhD in Chemistry.

@Jochen- Since we’re hijacking this comment thread we might as well go all the way. American steak is better, probably because it’s closer to the cow here than in Europe, and I’ll give you crusty bread, interesting cheeses and simpler food (most of the time).

But I’ll be damned if I let you talk bad about American beer! The mass-produced stuff is swill, but I’d put our craft and micro-breweries up against any in the world. The creativity and variety of American beers is unmatched. Unmatched, I say! You just have to know where to look.

@ Nate: well, I suppose your steak tastes better because your cattle is mostly kept on huge farms where they feed on real, almost natural grass. In central Europe, cattle are also kept outside but the areas are often too small so the cattle has to be fed as well by providing additional fooder, and the meadows are heavily fertilized and contain little herbs and natural vegetation, just “fad” grass.

About the beer: well, I suppose you just have to prove that to me when I visit NC. I would like to mention though that I am (as all Germans are) very conservative when beer is involved and am very fond of the Reinheitsgebot (purity law?) – so don’t think you’ll win me over by serving me any corn beer or beer mixed with fermented berry juice or whatever – just straight beer made from water, hops and malt.

Cheers, Nate – literally!
I do hope to visit you soon – not just for the birds (but a Swallow-tailed Kite would be nice to see, no doubt).

@Nate – good to know. I’ll have to inquire before my future-whenever-trip to the US how many bottles of beer I am legally allowed to take with me – or what the punishment is if I import a few too many.

Is it still after the weekend? ‘Cause I don’t think the first weekend in December will be as exciting as the last weekend in November. And…does Tuesday count as part of the weekend? Even though it was December? If the answers are yes, then, like Patrick, I saw a gull. And it was ivory-colored. With a little black: http://www.flickr.com/photos/queensgirl

But, if you are going to be strict, then my best bird of the last weekend in November was a Short-tailed Hawk flying about 3-feet above my head on the road to the Everglades. Three White-tailed Kites run a close second (or third, if you count the gull).